


When Ahtohallan Calls

by Inisheer



Category: Frozen (Disney Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, totally canon if i did it right, what i write when i'm procrastinating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-26
Updated: 2019-11-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:14:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21575830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inisheer/pseuds/Inisheer
Summary: So I saw Frozen II.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 75





	When Ahtohallan Calls

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers (duh) for the new movie.

No. The call isn’t new.

*

About the time Anna starts walking, Elsa falls sick. It’s only a cold, a name for the illness Elsa declares stupid because she’s not _cold_ , she’s too _hot_ , opening windows as fast as her parents can close them. They fret because she’s never fallen ill before, even as a baby (and won’t again for eighteen years), and because they always fret over her, this pale odd daughter who seems fragile as ice.

She sneezes snowflakes.

On the third night she climbs out of the window onto the roof, steadying herself barefoot in the summer drizzle by freezing her soles to the tiles, and the north wind finally cools her small body. With it comes the call – but she’s four years old, still so new to the world that few things about it seem stranger than others, and she knows this one means no harm.

She has no thought of following it. She’s too young to go outside alone.

This isn’t the first time she’s heard it, even then.

Elsa crawls back in and under the covers, and in the morning when her mother finds her the fever has broken and her hair has dried. (The pool of rainwater blown in the window has not.)

*

It’s not exactly a voice. Sometimes it’s more of a tug, a feeling, a knowing. Most of the time she tunes it out. She thinks of it as intermittent. Only later, after she’s followed it, will she understand it was never truly silent.

*

A month after Iduna sings the Song of Memory for the first time, a nobleman visits from up the fjord. He brings his wife and his children, two sons who are only babies and a daughter between Elsa and Anna in age. The girls are expected to play together while the grown-ups talk royal business.

Agnarr pulls them aside and suggests that Elsa does not perform magic while the visitors are here, and neither of them mention that she can.

‘Yes, Papa.’

Anna frowns. ‘Why not? What will we talk about?’

‘Absolutely anything else.’

‘But it’s the coolest thing we’ve got!’

‘It’s not cool, it’s ice-cold,’ Elsa corrects, and Anna sticks her tongue out and Agnarr leaves. Elsa realises her sister hasn’t noticed she’s not supposed to do magic when they’re out in the city, or that the staff are sworn to silence. She knew those things at Anna’s age, so it’s not because she’s young, it’s because she has no magic.

For the first time in her life, Elsa envies her sister.

She can make it snow indoors, though, so not by very much.

Elsa tries to explain, and it’s clear Anna can’t understand their father’s fear because to her magic is wondrous and beautiful, but she understands keeping secrets (like when they play in the great hall at night) and it’s exciting to share one with her big sister.

It’s Elsa who struggles. It’s one thing not to use her powers for a few hours, another to ignore them for a whole week-long visit. Her fingers start itching in a way she can’t scratch. She struggles to sleep. By the fifth day, she’s making slips, which almost never happens: iced-over soup and a bedpost and frosting on the windows. There are no witnesses but Anna, who watches with wide eyes.

‘I’m fine, Anna. Go back to bed.’ Elsa frowns at the bedpost, trying to calculate how to unfreeze it. Unfreezing is always harder than freezing.

Anna’s sharing her bed, because the nobleman’s daughter is in hers. The castle has dozens of spare rooms. Elsa feels sometimes as if her father is testing her.

The next night she sneaks outside, down to the fjord, and grows ice crystals on the rocks and ice animals in the water. The voice dances around her. Elsa thinks of the long lonely miles, the empty spaces on their maps, without people, without judgement.

‘I’m going to be the queen,’ she tells the voice. ‘I have to stay here. Forever.’

Iduna finds her and drapes her scarf around Elsa’s shoulders.

‘I’m not cold.’

‘But you look like you should be. It makes me feel better.’ Her mother smiles down at her, and Elsa drops her gaze to the ice creatures at her feet.

‘I’m sorry. I know I wasn’t supposed to.’

‘I don’t see anybody here,’ Iduna says. She winks at Elsa and pulls her close, and Elsa buries her face against her. This is home, isn’t it? Isn’t this what home is supposed to feel like? It’s certainly love.

*

North. Like a compass point. Like the peasant girl who rescued the bear-prince. The land of forever ice, the land explorers dream of. Elsa does not dream of it. She dreams normally, until the accident happens, and then she dreams in terror, which under the circumstances is also normal.

*

She is supposed to keep secrets _with_ Anna. Not _from_ Anna.

If it was only a matter of not saying, Elsa could keep her mouth shut and change nothing else. The problem is not doing, which feels more and more like not being, trying to be someone else, a girl without magic.

She understands now. It’s dangerous. _She’s_ dangerous. _Elsa, what have you done?_ She buries herself in books, mathematics, history, languages. She will be queen. She will be a good queen and a good daughter, even if she is a monster, and she will pass the throne to Anna’s children and the taint will end with her.

(Lamarck numbers among Elsa’s reading. Darwin and Mendel, fortunately for her fragile psyche, have not published yet.)

(Lamarck doesn’t have any explanation for _why_ Elsa has powers in the first place, but some threads are best not tugged at. She suspects that question might lead north, a place she’s not supposed to go. She is trying to be good.)

So she pushes Anna away. Keeps the door closed. Wears the gloves. Don’t feel it, conceal it, don’t feel it: if she chants those loud enough inside her own skull it is almost enough to drown the call out. And her anger, but she is not angry, but she is angry at the trolls for speaking in riddles, at her powers for growing ever more insistent as she tries to suppress them, at her parents for asking the impossible, that Anna can so carelessly continue to love them while Elsa is shut away from everyone. But she’s the monster, isn’t she?

In the dark, when she’s too tired to fight, the voice murmurs that she’s not.

*

They will always be Iduna’s little girls, even too old to let her sing them to sleep. She checks on Anna first, smoothing down her hair and pulling a romance from her limp grasp. Within an hour Anna will be a tangle of limbs and blankets but she can at least rescue the book. (Anna reads a lot of stories about being swept off your feet by a prince for someone destined to marry a prince anyway.)

In Elsa’s room she treads lightly. Her elder daughter is more easily startled and the consequences are worse when she is. She’s neater, too, leaving Iduna no straightening-up as an excuse to hover. She hovers regardless.

She almost thinks she didn’t hear it. Then, a moment later, Elsa repeats the melody. Iduna waits for a third, hand pressed to her mouth, before slipping from the room. She finds Agnarr in his study.

‘Elsa knows Ahtohallan’s call.’

‘What?’

‘The call I used to ask the spirits for help, the day – that day. She knows it. I don’t know _how_ , I don’t know if she even knows, she was sleeping, but – Agnarr. Think what this means.’

‘Could she have learned it from you?’

Iduna shakes her head, pacing, waiting for her husband to catch up. ‘I haven’t sung it since then. You don’t call to Ahtohallan unless she calls you first.’ She couldn’t sing it now. She heard it five minutes ago, and recognised it, but there’s a blank in her head where the tune should be.

Elsa is her baby. And the spirits are not as benevolent as Iduna believed in childhood. If the river’s calling her daughter, she is determined to get there first.

‘You think Elsa’s powers might have something to do with the spirits? The forest?’

Finally. ‘It makes as much sense as anything else.’

‘It does,’ Agnarr agrees, though Iduna can hear his silent gripe that nothing about magic makes sense to begin with.

So he might take some convincing on the next bit: ‘We need to find Ahtohallan.’

‘What? Just sail north looking for a half-mythical river at the edge of the world?’

‘Yes, exactly.’ She reaches for his hand. ‘It’ll be an adventure.’

He doesn’t immediately agree. He doesn’t pull away, either.

*

Ahtohallan. First and last. The mother of spirits.

*

‘Kristoff. Relax. I’m not going to freeze you.’

Sven laughs, reindeer-ish, with his ears and tail. Kristoff doesn’t.

‘So you’re saying I have your – ah – I have your blessing?’

‘With all my heart.’

Kristoff breathes a sigh of relief. He regains a little of his normal pallor. Then he hugs her, one part surprising to three parts bone-crushing, and next thing Elsa knows she has a reindeer breathing down her neck. ‘I didn’t promise not to freeze _you_.’

Sven licks her ear.

‘I’ve gotta go tell Olaf!’ says Kristoff, and he’s gone, Sven galloping behind, before Elsa can finish saying _Are you sure that’s a good idea?_ Olaf, love him, still doesn’t have the best sense of when to keep his mouth shut.

As their footsteps fade Elsa wanders to the window.

_Ah-ah ah-ah._

Magic is one thing. She’s always had her powers, always known they were an irrevocable part of herself, for good or ill. This is something else. Something that says, she might not be who she thinks she is, might not belong where she believes she does.

Once it was comforting, to suspect her true home lay elsewhere. Now it’s not. Now she has something to lose.

The voice is so loud she would swear everyone else must be able to hear it, and she knows they cannot.

**Author's Note:**

> Point the first: I have something strep-like and can't currently concentrate on my original fiction, so here's another fly-by in a fandom I've shown no previous interest in! :P
> 
> Point the second: on an emotional level I loved the new movie, and I'm not among those who think the world-building stuff about magic and spirits doesn't make sense (at least by Disney and for that matter fairytale standards) though it could have been fleshed out a *little* more, but what got me was the lack of hints or hooks to it in the first film. (Unless I missed it - you tell me.) Anyway, it was nagging at me for a couple of days and then this sprung to life and you lucky folks get to read it.
> 
> Brownie points: for anyone who can name the not-so-obscure Norwegian folk tale reference.


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